First Minister of Scotland Alex Salmond, who is also chief of the separatist Scottish National Party (SNP), has confessed to being a huge Marvel comics fan and a slightly ironic admirer of so-bad-it's-awesome movie Ghosts of Mars. At a Scottish Film Fest event hosted by comic book writer Mark Millar (Kick-Ass), the First Minister said:

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Growing up I bought Marvel comics - which was far from cool at the time. My mother was just glad it wasn't Playboy!

After watching a screening of Ghosts of Mars, the John Carpenter flick about (among other things) a lesbian military that runs Mars, Salmond said the movie was one of his favorites, though he did have some criticism:

It could've been great but it wasn't. The film had a lot going for it, although John Carpenter, the director, gave up movie-making for nine years after this . . . In the first ten minutes, a leading man and a leading lady come on to Natasha [Henstridge]'s character. But there's no sex for the rest of the movie. And in the trailers, they could only show the very end scene because she's in a hospital with virtually nothing on.

Completely true.

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Finally, Salmond finished his weird public appearance by telling Millar that the one superpowers he'd like to have are the ones that independence would bring to everyone in Scotland. So . . . Scottish independence means superpowers for everybody? That's a pretty good platform.